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Apple

10 ways Apple really has changed the (tech) world

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Apple is both a creator of and a beacon for the technology future we now live in

10 ways Apple really has changed the (tech) world
From the beginning, Apple liked to proclaim how it was inventing the future with products that would change the world. That visionary impulse often comes across as stubbornness, with Apple ignoring what the pundits say — and it often comes across as overwrought, when Apple puts on its “it’s all amazing and revolutionary” dog-and-pony shows. Even when co-founder Steve Jobs wasn’t at Apple, that attitude has prevailed.

Yet no tech company in the past 35 years has done as much user-facing innovation as Apple. Never mind that most people don’t use Macs or iPads. Even when it doesn’t win the market, Apple defines the market time and again.

Here are the 10 most significant products Apple has created, ones that really have changed the world.

Macintosh: Defining the computer for the rest of us
Steve Jobs didn’t create the Mac, but he did create the mythos around it and recognized that it heralded a new, better way to use computers. Ironically, the horribly expensive Mac became the emblem of computing for the masses, a human device for real people who had seen computers as unfathomable tools used only by engineers and scientists.

Microsoft took the core principles of the Mac’s graphical, direct-manipulation interface, itself inspired by work at Xerox PARC, and brought them to Windows, delivering the promise of the Mac to the masses for real. Today, the approach pioneered by the Mac is simply how computers work.

OS X: No operating system does it better
At the core of the Mac today is OS X, Apple’s Unix-based operating system that remains the leader in intuitiveness and ease of use, yet offers sophisticated capabilities from data detectors to malware detection that actually work. The tight integration and intentionality of the OS and Apple’s bundled apps create a superior experience, even if many users don’t use much of what they could.

We forget that OS X was not the original Mac OS. In its 15 years of existence, OS X has pulled off the neat trick of evolving significantly while working as you’d expect. Each version arrives fresh and familiar. Microsoft certainly hasn’t had that happy result in its Windows versions over that same period, with two wins and two flops.

iPod: The music world, reinvented
After Steve Jobs’ 12-year journey in the wilderness of Next and Pixar, he returned to a near-dead Apple — and came up with the iPod. MP3 players already existed, but none really mattered. Portable CD players and the industry’s portability granddaddy, the Sony Walkman, still ruled.

In 2001, the iPod changed all that, thanks to a better user experience. It also changed the music industry: Songs now mattered, not albums, and with the iTunes Store, Apple shifted the distribution of music from physical stores to downloads. The music business — and music listening — in 2014 bears little resemblance to that of 2001.

The iPod also changed Apple, converting the computer company into a consumer technology company, which is the source of its strength today.

iPhone: The end of the cell phone, the beginning of mobile computing
When the iPhone debuted in 2007, InfoWorld’s Tom Yager derided it as a $1,975 iPod, due to its required data plan. A year later, Apple debuted the App Store, and the iPhone was no longer an iPod that could make calls. Apple smartly created several rich apps — iMovie, GarageBand, Pages, Keynote, Numbers — that to this day are unrivaled as mobile apps and show that a smartphone isn’t a cellphone that supports email, as the once-dominant BlackBerry had been, but a computer in its own right. Apple had this vision back in 1993 with its Newton MessagePad, which clearly presages the iPhone of 2007.

Today, Android rules much of the smartphone world; like Windows used the Mac as inspiration, Android used the iPhone.

App Store: A digital store for a digital world
Remember when software was a digital thing on an analog disk? It was back before there was an app for that.

The App Store did more than distribute bits as bits: It introduced the notions of curated content (which developers hate but has kept iOS largely malware-free), and it made possible the notion that you buy apps that can run on multiple devices you own — a major break from traditional licenses. Apple understood early on that in a digital world, endpoints are federated, and the software industry needs to think beyond physical installations. Now, an app store is just the way it’s done, including at Google and Microsoft.

iPad: The PC, reinvented — and the TV, reinvented
There were tablets, or at least slates, on the original Star Trek TV series in the 1960s. In the modern PC era, there’ve been Windows tablets since at least the XP days, but all were flops.

The iPad changed that, becoming the first tablet that people wanted, and spawning a copycat industry (some copies pre-dated the iPad itself, based on rumors). But no one does it as well as the iPad.

Tablets now sell as many units as PCs do, and the iPad was the fastest-adopted mass technology in human history. Tablets can be your mobile PC, but they’re as likely to (also) be your personal TV, among other things. Amazing.

Touch: The gestures we all use came from Apple
It doesn’t matter what devices or operating systems you run, when it comes to touch gestures, they all work very much the same way — at core, Apple’s way. Apple has vigorously protected some gestures through patents, but the basic gestures it introduced on the iPhone are practically universal. They’ve become like mouse movements, used by everyone.

That universality has quickly let the gesture approach to computing take off, as both developers and users can focus less on learning the UI and more on, well, using it. Most of Apple’s impact has been on mobile devices, but its adaption of touch to computers via touch-enabled mice and trackpads probably means when touch PCs finally get popular, they’ll use Apple’s gestures, too.

Autodiscovery networking: Connecting a connected world
IT has long hated Apple networking technology because it’s chatty, inefficient, and not concerned about IT control. But if you want things to connect in the world of people, you count on Apple technology.

Want to share files or music on a Mac? It’s automatic, thanks to built-in discovery protocols. Want to print from an iPad or iPhone? Select a printer and let AirPrint do the work, no drivers needed. Want play music at someone’s house? Turn on AirPlay. (If they have an AirPlay-enabled device.) Video and presentations are likewise a snap. File sharing is follow these lines via AirDrop in ad hoc networks. And Handoff is a step in this direction for app interactions.

Apple knows the secret: It’s about connecting, not networking.

iBeacons: Contextual technology for the real world
Apple’s location-aware sensors are only a year old, so it’s too soon to call them a revolution, but I think they’re well poised to be.

It’s not the hardware that’s key, but the APIs and hooks in iOS that let an iPhone or iPad — and future devices — combine location information with both local and cloud data to open a new world for users. I’m sure that iBeacons, motion coprocessors, HealthKit, CloudKit, CarPlay, and other contextual technology are part of an Apple 3.0 that has just begun to emerge.

 

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Tech

Microsoft scraps ‘Windows-first’ practice, puts Office on iPad before Surface

New CEO Satya Nadella comes out swinging on ‘cloud first, mobile first’ strategy

As expected, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella today hosted a press conference where the company unveiled Office for iPad, breaking with its past practice of protecting Windows by first launching software on its own operating system.

CEO Satya Nadella expounded on Microsoft’s ‘cloud first, mobile first’ strategy today as his company unveiled Office for iPad as proof of its new platform-agnosticism.

Three all-touch core apps — Word, Excel and PowerPoint — have been seeded to Apple’s App Store and are available now.

The sales model for the new apps is different than past Microsoft efforts. The Office apps can be used by anyone free of charge to view documents and present slideshows. But to create new content or documents, or edit existing ones, customers must have an active subscription to Office 365.

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Microsoft labeled it a “freemium” business model, the term used for free apps that generate revenue by in-app purchases.

Today’s announcement put an end to years of speculation about whether, and if so when, the company would trash its strategy of linking the suite with Windows in an effort to bolster the latter’s chances on tablets. It also reversed the path that ex-CEO Steve Ballmer laid out last October, when for the first time he acknowledged an edition for the iPad but said it would appear only after a true touch-enabled version had launched for Windows tablets.

It also marked the first time in memory that Microsoft dealt a major product to an OS rival of its own Windows.

“Microsoft is giving users what they want,” Carolina Milanesi, strategic insight director of Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, said in an interview, referring to long-made customer demands that they be able to run Office on any of the devices they owned, even those running a Windows rival OS. “The connection to Office 365 was also interesting in that this puts users within Microsoft’s ecosystem at some point.”

Prior to today, Microsoft had released minimalist editions of Office, dubbed “Office Mobile,” for the iPhone and Android smartphones in June and July 2013, respectively. Originally, the iPhone and Android Office Mobile apps required an Office 365 subscription; as of today, they were turned into free apps for home use, although an Office 365 plan is still needed for commercial use.

Talk of Office on the iPad first heated up in December 2011, when the now-defunct The Daily reported Microsoft was working on the suite, and added that the software would be priced at $10 per app. Two months later, the same publication claimed it had seen a prototype and that Office was only weeks from release.

That talk continued, on and off, for more than two years, but Microsoft stuck to its Windows-first strategy. Analysts who dissected Microsoft’s moves believed that the company refused to support the iPad in the hope that Office would jumpstart sales of Windows-powered tablets.

Office’s tie with Windows had been fiercely debated inside Microsoft, but until today, operating system-first advocates had won out. But slowing sales of Windows PCs — last year, the personal computer industry contracted by about 10% — and the continued struggles gaining meaningful ground in tablets pointed out the folly of that strategy, outsiders argued.

Some went so far as to call Windows-first a flop.

Microsoft has long hewed to that strategy: The desktop version of Office has always debuted on Windows, for example, with a refresh for Apple’s OS X arriving months or even more than a year later.

Microsoft today added free Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for the iPad to the existing OneNote.

On his first day on the job, however, Nadella hinted at change when he said Microsoft’s mission was to be “cloud first, mobile first,” a signal, said analysts, that he understood the importance of pushing the company’s software and services onto as many platforms as possible.

Nadella elaborated on that today, saying that the “cloud first, mobile first” strategy will “drive everything we talk about today, and going forward. We will empower people to be productive and do more on all their devices. We will provide the applications and services that empower every user — that’s Job One.”

Like Office Mobile on iOS and Android, Office for iPad was tied to Microsoft’s software-by-subscription Office 365.

Although the new Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps can be used free of charge to view documents and spreadsheets, and present PowerPoint slideshows, they allow document creation and editing only if the user has an active Office 365 subscription. Those subscriptions range from the consumer-grade $70-per-year Office 365 Personal to a blizzard of business plans starting at $150 per user per year and climbing to $264 per user per year.

Moorhead applauded the licensing model. “It’s very simple. Unlike pages of requirements that I’m used to seeing from Microsoft to use their products, if you have Office 365, you can use Office for iPad. That’s it,” Moorhead said.

He also thought that the freemium approach to Office for iPad is the right move. “They’ve just pretty much guaranteed that if you’re presenting on an iPad you will be using their apps,” said Moorhead of PowerPoint.

Moorhead cited the fidelity claims made by Julie White, a general manager for the Office technical marketing team, who spent about half the event’s time demonstrating Office for iPad and other software, as another huge advantage for Microsoft. “They’re saying 100% document compatibility [with Office on other platforms], so you won’t have to convert a presentation to a PDF,” Moorhead added.

Document fidelity issues have plagued Office competitors for decades, and even the best of today’s alternatives cannot always display the exact formatting of an Office-generated document, spreadsheet or presentation.

Both Milanesi and Moorhead were also impressed by the strategy that Nadella outlined, which went beyond the immediate launch of Office for iPad.

“I think [Satya Nadella] did a great job today,” said Milanesi. “For the first time I actually see a strategy [emphasis in original].

“Clearly there’s more to come,” Milanesi said. “It was almost as if Office on iPad was not really that important, but they just wanted to get [its release] out of way so they could show that there’s more they bring to the plate.”

That “more” Milanesi referred to included talk by Nadella and White of new enterprise-grade, multiple-device management software, the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).

“With the management suite and Office 365 and single sign-on for developers, Microsoft is really doing something that others cannot do,” Milanesi said. “They made it clear that Microsoft wants to be [enterprises’] key partner going forward.”

Moorhead strongly agreed. “The extension of the devices and services strategy to pull together these disparate technologies, including mobile, managing those devices, authenticating users for services, is something Microsoft can win with. It’s a good strategy,” Moorhead said.

“This was the proof point of delivering on the devices and services strategy,” Moorhead concluded. “And that strategy is definitely paying off.”

Office for iPad can be downloaded from Apple’s App Store. The three apps range in size from 215MB (for PowerPoint) to 259MB (for Word), and require iOS 7 or later.

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Tech

Few use tablets to replace laptops

Workers still see value in laptops for running most critical apps, IDC survey says

Many new tablets, including the new Kindle Fire HDX, are marketed as ways to create documents and other content for work-related tasks, instead of purely for home consumption of video and games.

Even with the focus on workplace productivity, a new survey shows that only 8.7% of tablet buyers want to use the tablet as a replacement for their laptops. The same survey by IDC found that 58.5% of respondents bought a tablet to use in addition to a laptop, and not as a replacement.

The online survey was conducted in April and included 299 U.S. consumers. All of them were 18 or older.

The results might have been different if the survey included younger tablet users, ages 17 and under, since that group has grown up with tablets since the first iPad went on sale in 2010, said Tom Mainelli, an IDC analyst and author of a report on the survey.

“The younger generation has different sentiments about phones and tablets and how useful they are,” Mainelli said in an interview.

Still, he said the finding that only 8.7% found a tablet as a replacement for a laptop was a surprise. “When we ask that question again in a year, I’d expect you will see a growing percentage view a tablet at least as possibly replacing a laptop,” Mainelli said.

“A huge percentage of people still see a lot of value in a laptop for one kind of app or service they use on it,” he added. “Would they want to do their taxes on a tablet? They haven’t quite made the leap to being comfortable with a mobile device like a tablet.”

“But that [expanded tablet] usage is coming, and we see more people doing more things on tablets,” Mainelli added. “Professionals still rely on laptops and a lot of them are just not really even thinking about the possibilities that the tablet offers and instead are concerned that a tablet doesn’t run Flash or can only open one app at a time.”

Mainelli said it’s notable that Amazon announced two new Kindle Fire HDX tablets last week with an emphasis on business-class features such as a native VPN client and hardware and software encryption.

“Amazon is getting much more serious about making its tablets enterprise-ready,” he said. The same can be said for iPads and many Android devices.

IDC has predicted 190 million tablets will be shipped to retailers in 2013, of which about half run on the Android mobile operating systen and half on iOS, with fractional amounts running Windows. Amazon runs on a custom version of Android and has dubbed its latest OS the Fire OS 3.0 Mojito.

In the IDC survey, 35% said they own an iOS tablet; 26.4% said they owned a tablet running standard Android; 10% said they owned a custom Android tablet like a Kindle Fire; 9.4% said they owned a Windows tablet and 0.7% owned a Windows RT tablet. More than 14% said they didn’t know the OS on their tablet.

The survey also asked tablet owners if they had a chance to buy a tablet again, would they buy one with the same OS. The iOS owners were most likely to say yes (80.2%), followed closely by Windows owners (78.9%); standard Android owners were third (70%), and custom Android owners were 68%.

Mainelli said the lower values for owners who would buy both kinds of Android again are likely a reflection of the many varieties of Android tablets on the market, some priced as low as $79 for a white box version and others from various vendors priced close to the iPad with Retina display at $499. Google’s Nexus 10 16 GB tablet running pure Android sells for $399.

“People who own the higher-end Androids probably have a similar affinity for them as do iOS owners,” he said. But Mainelli said he was somewhat surprised by the high affinity for Windows. “Those owning Windows have a strong inclination to buy one again, right below Apple,” he noted.

 

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Microsoft, Tech

Microsoft takes Outlook Web App native on iPhone, iPad

Microsoft takes Outlook Web App native on iPhone, iPad
Just as with Office Mobile — the truncated Excel, PowerPoint and Word — OWA requires an Office 365 subscription

Microsoft today launched Outlook Web App (OWA) for iOS, a “native” app that reprises — and amplifies — the in-browser OWA corporate workers have long used on devices that don’t support the full-fledged Outlook client.

The new app, which comes in iPhone and iPad flavors, offers the same functionality as the browser-based OWA, letting users access email, calendars, contacts and other inbox data housed on a company’s Exchange server.

But because the apps are iOS-native — in other words, they’re written specifically for Apple’s mobile OS, not simply a Web app in disguise — they can tap the hardware, adding features like gesture support and voice control.

The native app approach also means it can be used when offline, unlike the in-browser OWA which requires an Internet connection.

Wes Miller, an analyst with Kirkland, Wash.-based Directions on Microsoft, was impressed. “In terms of packaging this is a really neat idea, with a very, very good [user] experience,” said Miller, who ticked off several examples, ranging from push notifications to the hardware integration.

There are caveats.

As it did last month with Office Mobile for iPhone, Microsoft is dangling the iOS OWA carrot to tempt customers into subscribing to Office 365, the rent-not-own plans introduced earlier this year. Only customers with active Office 365 accounts can use OWA on the iPhone or iPad, even though the app itself is free to download from Apple’s App Store.

More important, if apparently temporary, is the requirement of Exchange Online, the off-premises, hosted Exchange service included with virtually every non-consumer Office 365 plan. Businesses that still run their own on-premise Exchange servers are out of luck for now.

“We are planning to deliver OWA to Exchange 2013 on-premise customers at a future date, but we have no additional details to share today,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said in answer to questions today.

“That’s a deal-breaker for some customers,” said Miller in a Tuesday interview before Microsoft clarified that it would offer OWA to organizations with an in-house Exchange infrastructure, a category that includes most medium- and large-sized companies. What remains unknown is when those Office 365 users will get their hands on OWA for iOS.

Microsoft’s approach to iOS apps has taken some licks from outsiders who view the Office 365-only strategy as misguided. “Anyone [with Office 2013] should be able to access the app,” Forrester analyst Frank Gillett said last month about Office Mobile for the iPhone. “They’re continuing the artificial advantaging of one product over another to change customer behavior. We think that’s a major mistake.”

Gillett’s point may be a month old, but it applies equally to OWA for iPhone and iPad: Microsoft customers who have adopted Office 2013 in perpetual license form rather than as a subscription are barred from running the new app.

Even so, Miller argued that the limitation is consistent with Microsoft’s claim that it is now a “devices and services” company, not one which sells packaged software.

“Where they don’t sell devices, they’ll try to sell services,” said Miller, referring to Office 365.

OWA for the iPhone and the iPad can be downloaded from the App Store.

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Android, Apple, iPhone, Microsoft

Microsoft Office 365 lands in US iPhone App Store

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Office Mobile is only available for iPhone, iPad users can use Office Web Apps for now, Microsoft said

Microsoft released a version of its office suite for iPhones in the U.S. that is only available for Office 365 subscribers.

Microsoft released the Microsoft Office Mobile suite for iPhones Friday. The software is compatible with iPhone 4, 4S and 5, and the iPod Touch (5th generation) and requires iOS 6.1 or later, according to the iTunes release notes.

Mobile Office allows users to access, view and edit Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint documents, according to the release notes. Because charts, animations and SmartArt graphics and shapes are supported, documents look like their originals, Microsoft said, adding that formatting and content remain intact when edits are made.

iPhone users can access Office documents that are stored on SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro and Sharepoint.

“Office Mobile is cloud-connected. The documents you’ve recently viewed on your computer are readily available on your phone in the recent documents panel,” Microsoft said. It is also possible to view and edit documents attached to email settings.

Documents can also be edited offline. Changes will be saved online when the device reconnects with the network, Microsoft said.

When opening a Word document from SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro on an iPhone, “it automatically resumes at the place where you left off reading, even if you last viewed the document on your PC or tablet.”

While the app is free, an Office 365 subscription is required to use it, Microsoft said. The subscription version, called Office 365 Home Premium, costs US$99.99 per household annually. The app will also work with a 365 trial account, Microsoft said, adding that using the Office Mobile app for Windows Phone does not require a subscription.

The app is only available in the U.S. for now. “Office Mobile for iPhone will be available in 29 languages covering 135 markets.A The international rollout will occur over approximately 4-5 days,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

The app is not available in an optimized version for the iPad. “Like all iPhone apps, Office Mobile can work on iPad, either small or ‘2X’ scaled up, but you’ll have a more satisfying experience using Office Web Apps,” Microsoft said.

Office for iPad is reportedly scheduled for release in October 2014.

 

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Microsoft, Tech, Windows 8

Windows 8 Update: 50k apps now in Windows Store

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Also: Windows RT gets dissed, iPads beware Windows 8

There are now more than 50,000 Windows 8-only applications available in the Windows Store, a big jump from when Windows 8 launched, but a far cry from what the company projected just before the launch.

According to the website MetroStore Scanner, the store has 50,341 apps on the shelves, finally reaching that number over the weekend after more or less growing steadily at 10% per month since last October. There was a spike in December perhaps as part of the Christmas rush.

ANALYSIS: What if Windows 8 flops?
But back in October Microsoft predicted it would have an inventory of more than 100,000 by the end of January, and now nearly two months later has just half that has materialized.

It’s bad news for Windows 8 and Microsoft because by the company’s own admission applications designed for the touch-friendly operating system are essential for attracting customers to it. Compelling apps mean more converts.

Getting apps has proven a challenge, with the latest enticement being an offer of $100 to developers for every Windows 8 app they get placed in the Windows Store up to 10. They can reap the bounty for an additional 10 Windows Phone 8 apps in the Windows Phone Store. “Offer good only to the first 10,000 qualified applications published in the Windows Store and/or Windows Phone Store, or until the end of the promotional period, whichever comes first,” Microsoft says.

That’s $1 million Microsoft is ponying up to stimulate apps development in this promotion alone. That doesn’t include the cost of developer trainings and a generous royalty agreement for the most popular applications.

While 50,000 apps is a benchmark, it’s coming too late for it to be considered a positive benchmark.

Jettison Windows RT?
Meanwhile, Microsoft is using the same Windows Store stats to defend Windows RT, the hardware/software platform based on ARM chips that runs a light version of Windows 8 and can handle only Windows Store Modern applications.

Windows RT came under fire recently from IDC, which suggested Microsoft dump the package. It is intended to compete with iPads, but hasn’t made strong inroads so far. Nevertheless, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows planning told CNET that “as the number of apps grow in the store, that value promise only gets stronger.”

That value promise was based on a narrow set of circumstances. “Let’s say you drop that PC in a pool. Well, you get a new one and then you just redownload [the apps],” he told CNET. “That’s the kind of model people are used to with a phone or tablet today. I can maintain all the apps in the [Microsoft] store and reset with a single switch. So, on Windows RT, the user experience stays consistent over time.”

iPads beware
Despite the attack on Windows RT, the full Windows 8 software that supports any app that runs on Windows 7 is getting praised as an operating system for tablets.

Moor Insights and Strategy says in a whitepaper that Windows 8 tablets offer more than one advantage over Apple’s tablet. “Enterprise IT can and are deploying iPads but are doing so at an increased cost, time and complexity than PCs,” the paper says.

These tablets are PCs only without the keyboard, and so have a the manageability of a laptop with the touch centricity of Windows 8. The Intel Clover Trail processor gives the devices performance per watt that is comparable to that of the iPad, the paper says. “Through the combination of Intel Clover Trail and Windows 8, HP, Dell and Lenovo have created tablets that take the best the consumer elements of the iPad and adds to it enterprise features IT wants in their next generation tablets,” it says. “Enterprises should immediately evaluate the latest enterprise tablet offerings from HP, Dell and Lenovo and make their decisions on future deployments incorporating those additional options.”

Acer likes Windows 8
Acer President Jim Wong had some nice things to say about Windows 8 tablets recently during a financials conference call.

According to StreetInsider.com, Wong expects sales of tablets in general to pick up over the course of 2013.

According to the website, “More importantly, Wong said that momentum in Microsoft Windows 8 devices has been improving. Acer Chairman J.T. Wang echoed the sentiment during the company’s conference call, saying that Microsoft “has done some good things finally” to revitalize the Windows ecosystem.”

 

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Apple, iPad

Tablet smackdown: iPad vs Surface RT in the enterprise

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IPads are already making their way into businesses via bring-your-own-device efforts with Microsoft Surface RT tablets hoping to follow suit as employees lobby for their favorite devices. But which one makes more sense from an IT perspective?

Read Network World’s other tech arguments.

The two products are roughly similar in price ($500), run touch-centric operating systems, are highly portable and weigh about a pound and a half.

The two most significant differences are that Surface RT comes with both a keyboard and a version of Microsoft Office – Office 2013 Home & Student 2013 RT – which expand the potential corporate utility of the devices.

Third-party keyboards are available for iPads as are third-party versions of Office-compatible productivity suites but they represent more work for IT. A rumor says Microsoft is working on a client that will allow accessing Office from an iPad through Microsoft’s service Office 365.

Office on Surface RT has its limitations. It lacks Outlook but includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and the Surface RT version requires a business license in order to be used for work. Still, having it installed out of the box is a leg up and gives workers the opportunity to tap into the productivity suite. The keyboard is a big plus.

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When it comes to numbers of applications iPad has far more than Surface RT, and neither one has the number of business applications that support traditional Windows operating systems. Surface RT is a Windows operating system that can’t run traditional Windows apps except for the Office suite specifically crafted for the platform.

Instead, Surface RT has its own class of applications called Windows Store apps, mainly because they can only be bought from the Window Store. They are tailored for touch tablets and must be vetted by Microsoft before they get into the store’s inventory.

They can be developed using XAML, with code-behind in C++, C#, or Visual Basic, and Microsoft has a provision for sideloading custom business apps to Surface RT without submitting them first to Microsoft. Even so, that’s a lot of work to get apps natively on the devices.

Both iPads and Surfaces support virtual desktops, which goes a long way toward making traditional apps available on them. Hosted virtual desktops (HVD) can be costly, Gartner says in a report called “Bring Your Own Device: New Opportunities, New Challenges”. Its research found that “shifting to an HVD model increases the onetime costs per device by more than $600.” Plus proper licensing of iPads for business use is complicated, the report says.

Managing Surface RT is possible via Windows cloud-based management Intune and Exchange ActiveSync for messaging. IPad also supports Exchange ActiveSync. Third-party mobile device management platforms can configure and update iPads as well as monitor compliance with corporate policies. They can also wipe or lock lost and stolen machines. OS X server can do all this as well.

Surface RT comes with security features iPad doesn’t. These include both hardware-based secure boot that checks that the system hasn’t been tampered with and also trusted boot that fires up anti-malware before anything else. That way malware can’t disable the anti-malware before it gets the chance to do its job. The same hardware security module can act as a smartcard for authentication, and Surface RT has full disk encryption.

The iPad has disk encryption but lacks the secure boot features of Surface RT. Its secure boot chain is based on read-only memory and its hardware security module doesn’t do double duty as a smartcard.

NOTE: There is another version of Surface that runs on x86 processors and supports any application that Windows 7 supports. It’s not available until next year, but is actually a tablet-sized full Windows laptop with all the touch capabilities of Surface RT.

That device would beat iPad hands-down if it cost the same, but it is likely to cost hundreds of dollars more than Surface RT.

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Tech

Developers: Up with iOS, down with HTML5

A survey of developers shows that their interest is in iOS, while Android and Windows 8 get mixed reviews

A just-released survey of more than 5,000 developers put another massive dent in in HTML5’s reputation as a development platform for mobile apps, locking in its reputation as one of the most overhyped technologies in years. Apple, though, still shines in the hearts of developers. Android? Not so much.

In the most recent quarterly survey of its own developer base, mobile application development platform vendor Appcelerator found widespread dissatisfaction with nearly every key feature of HTML5. (IDC conducted the actual survey.) Developers dissed the user experience, performance, monetization, fragmentation, distribution control, timeliness of new updates, and security. That covers pretty much the whole HTML5 app gamut.

[ Go deep into HTML5 programming in InfoWorld’s “HTML5 Megaguide Deep Dive” PDF how-to report. | Then understand the issues surrounding HTML5 today in InfoWorld’s HTML5 Deep Dive PDF strategy report. ]
 

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It’s worth remembering that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said that his biggest mistake to date was betting so heavily on HTML5, and so he’s moving the company to native code. Whether that’s really a blow to open standards isn’t yet clear. But given the enormous gravitational pull of Facebook, there’s no doubt that the move blew a huge hole in the future of HTML5. (My colleague Andrew Oliver has a very different view, saying Facebook blew it by not hiring enough top-notch developers.)

The only HTML5 features that earned a thumbs-up were cross-development capabilities and immediate updates, liked by a few points more than 80 percent of the respondents.

Michael King, Appcelerator’s head of developer relations, says there is a future for HTML5, but it will be with a limited class of applications. Things like forms and other apps with a low degree of interaction are appropriate, he says, but not immersive and interactive apps. They demand a native environment to have the performance, look and feel, and easy access to native features.

Apple, yes; Android and Windows 8, maybe
Apple maintained its dominance at the top of developers’ lists for mobile app development this quarter, with 85 percent of developers very interested in building apps for iOS smartphones and 83 percent similarly focused on iPad apps.

The survey was conducted in August, weeks before iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 were launched, so developers were unaware of the Apple Maps app fiasco. At the time of the survey, the iOS features developers said they were most looking forward to using were Apple Maps (37 percent) and enhanced Siri (22 percent). Despite the Apple Maps problem, “the massive numbers of applications that interface with or use Google Maps, such as Yelp and Facebook, will now rapidly migrate to Apple’s new mapping function, leaving Google a much smaller audience for Google-sponsored ads and Google information,” King says.

Android, though, did not fare well. Developer interest as measured by the survey has declined for three of the last four quarters. It appears that just under 66 percent of developers are very interested in developing for the Android tablet platform, and 76 percent for the Android smartphone platform. Google’s inability to curtail Android’s massive fragmentation, even with “Ice Cream Sandwich,” has forced developers to focus on the iPad as the leading tablet platform and on the iPhone first for smartphone apps,” King says.